It is often challenging to gauge the health of organs within an individual's body. Physicians are often forced to use expensive imaging techniques or perform invasive biopsies for cancer screening to identify diagnostic biomarkers and monitor tumor initiation and progression. The invasive nature of biopsies makes them unsuitable for widespread screening of patients. In addition, many diagnostic biomarkers are only identified in cancer cell lines or from biopsy specimens obtained from patients with late-stage disease and metastasis.
The presence of circulating nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) detectable in the plasma and serum of cancer patients has been investigated for its potential use to serve as markers for diagnostic purposes, with the obvious benefit being a non-invasive diagnostic tool. It has been shown that markers within the plasma are identical to the ones found in the carcinogenic tissue of the patient. Circulating RNA is particularly of interest for use in early detection cancer screenings due to RNA markers close association with malignancy.
In addition to cancer detection, the discovery of fetal specific cell-free RNA present in maternal plasma has opened up new horizons on prenatal molecular diagnostics (see e.g., Poon et al., Clinical Chemistry, 46(11): 1832-1834 (2000)). Specifically, analysis of plasma RNA holds promise for noninvasive gene expression profiling of the fetus. However, only a handful of pregnancy specific cell-free RNA transcripts have been characterized to date. A comprehensive profiling of such RNA has not been performed.
A problem with analyzing cell-free RNA in non-maternal and maternal blood is the lack of suitable data to estimate the biological causes of the cell-free RNA present. For example, there lacks a reliable method for determining tissue origins of the cell-free RNA present in blood.